Images on GSA SER Tier 2/3 campaigns — worth it or just wasting resources?

Hello guys,

I’m still learning and improving my link-building setup, so I wanted to get some opinions from people who have been doing this longer.

Currently I’m using a tiered structure and seeing good movement from it, so I’m continuing with the same approach. I use GSA SER mostly for Tier 2 and Tier 3, and sometimes for selected Tier 1 engines when I have better targets and good content.

For Tier 1 articles, I normally use richer content and add relevant images. Sometimes they are AI-generated, and sometimes I use royalty-free images from Unsplash, Pexels or Pixabay.

I’m not adding images because I think they directly provide some special SEO value. I mainly use them to make the article look more complete and hopefully improve approval chances or help the post stay live longer.

The thing is, I’ve also been adding images to my Tier 2 and Tier 3 article campaigns.

A friend of mine said this is unnecessary. I also asked Claude based on my project setup, and it gave me a similar answer. Basically, Tier 2 and Tier 3 are more about mass link building, powering the upper tier and helping those URLs get crawled or indexed. So spending extra time and resources adding images probably doesn’t make much difference there.

It makes sense, but before changing all my campaigns, I wanted to ask here.

Do you guys use images only for Tier 1 content, or do you also add them to Tier 2 and Tier 3?

Have you actually noticed better approval, retention or indexing from using images on the lower tiers, or is it mostly unnecessary work?

Interested to hear what you guys are doing in actual campaigns.

As someone who automates posting to third party platforms 'creatively' (ie. your content shouldn't really be there), I can say that most CMSs and the old platforms that GSA posts to will remove img tags from posted content - some won't even allow <br> tags. So for lower tiers you'll probably find your image code is filtered out before your content gets posted anyway.

This is kind of a million dollar question. I also used to add images (but default from GSA SER article options) by thinking it may help for more indexing however it seems it's overkill. There are some engines which support IMG that will try to post. However, never use your website (money site) images for any tier as you don't want a footprint to your website. Just use creatives and I personally whenever I use images, I use GSA SER image option and do random 0 to 2 images and 0 - 1 YouTube videos here and there. It all depends on what engines you are using and if you are using comments, social bookmarks etc. Of course GSA SER will strip out those tags most of the time as most platforms don't support. So adding images purposely or if it costs something, don't waste money you can simply give more link juice and more safely by adding authority link set to GSA SER and Google will see it as a nice signal. So whenever you create a backlink try to leave 2 or 3 links including yours and your competitors or authority.

Tier 1 - Images / 1 youtube video / authority links are ok. I would build this manually or just picking engines where GSA SER genuinely support rich media tags (HTML) platforms like web2.0s, Articles and some forums. - Must if you are building manually or using GSA SER with tier 1 engine which also support images / videos

Tier 2 and Tier 3 even you are building to engines where support those rich media i don't care as much as long as you are using good decent length articles.. We need tier 2 and 3 to pass the links. OFC using images will be good but it will waste resources (scraping timing hammering LPM etc) So for tier 1 is enough.

I am also following this thread for other expert opinion..